What’s this Emacs Hangout thing about? This is an informal way for Emacs geeks to get together and swap tips/notes/questions. You can find the previous Hangouts or sign up for the mailing list at http://sachachua.com/blog/tag/emacs-hangout/ .

Sod I’m in AU. Not qualified enough to present but would help out if I could

Sod Oscarfono

8:59 PM

thanks Dylan. perfect/ any ideas on a rough idea of numbers of emacs users globally? by region? hard to quantify i realise but are we talking hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands do you think? keen as Samer… i’m nowhere near as proficient with emacs, or programming as most here but i have many other skills.. event management, audio engineer, graphic design and close connection with large format commercial printer

Dylan Thiedeke

9:03 PM

Sod in Australia I couldn’t even imagine a number. Maybe poll the #emacs IRC channel on friend and the emacs group on G+

me

9:03 PM

Sod: Woohoo! Awesomeness.

Dylan Thiedeke

9:04 PM

Sod I’m not a programmer either but use emacs for documentations and starting to use it for project management with org-mode etc

Sod Oscarfono

9:04 PM

community is the magic word when talking to me

Samer Masterson

9:04 PM

emacsconf.github.io/emacsconf2015

Sod Oscarfono

9:05 PM

feel free to add me Dylan we can fire some ideas back and forth. maybe a poll of interest in a local conf or meetup

me

9:06 PM

Sod, Dylan: Neato!

Howard Abrams

9:07 PM

I’m sorry, but I have to leave as well. Thanks for the fun and I will listen to the rest later.

Emacs as a Lisp environment. (Also, Helm is what’s responsible for the display.) Evaluating a function makes it available in the global scope, which has all these functions and commands you can do. This makes it easy to iteratively develop your functions, because you can just execute things directly.

Edebug with C-u C-M-x. Interactive debugging. SPC moves you forward, one Lisp form at a time. It shows you results in the minibuffer. You can descend into Lisp forms or go into functions. ? shows keybindings. Check out the Emacs Lisp chapter on EDebug, highly recommendeg.

What functions should you call in the first place? What concepts? Emacs predates many standard terms, so that’s why things are a little confusing. Ex: “frames” and “windows” are not what you might think they are. OS window = frame. Area within Emacs = window. Opposite of HTML. Use the Emacs tutorial C-h t.

Paredit editing capabilities. Ex: C-k kills the current sexp. paredit-raise-sexp replaces the parent sexp with the following sexp. slurping and barfing. Barfing – spitting out an element from the list form. C-{ or C-} (with suggested keybindings). C-( and C-) are slurping, which pulls forms in. Works for strings, too.

In this Emacs Chat, Steve Purcell shares how he got started with Emacs by using a Vim emulation mode, what it’s like to give hundreds of package authors feedback on Emacs Lisp style, and how he’s eventually replacing himself with Emacs Lisp (flycheck-package). He also highlights useful packages for managing buffers of version-controlled files (ibuffer-vc), working with lines if the region isn’t active (whole-line-or-region), or maximizing certain buffers (full-frame).

Got a nifty Emacs workflow or story that you think other people might find useful? I’d love to set up an Emacs Chat episode with you. Please feel free to comment below or e-mail me at [email protected]!